100 Days of Anime: Day Fifteen – Giant Freakin’ Robots

Robots are cool. Giant robots are cooler. Giant robots you can drive are, obviously the coolest. I should honestly end this post here.

Mecha show up all over the place in media. Superhero media provides us with S.T.R.I.P.E. and Iron Man’s Hulkbuster. Elder Scrolls has Akulakhan and Numidium. There’s that entire Pacific Rim franchise. If we open it up to the more zoological side of things (which we are) you could even count the AT-ATs of Star Wars and their ilk.

But none of those are anime, and anime is what we’re here to talk about.

Mecha show up everywhere in anime, too. The Gundam and Evangelion franchises revolve around giant, piloted mecha, but even franchises like Pokémon feature them from time to time.

What we’re really here to talk about aren’t the mecha themselves but the shows they appear in. Despite the obvious and immediate appeal of giant robots punching things, I can’t say I’ve watched that many mecha shows from start to finish. While there’s not necessarily a ton I can tell you that the good folks at TV Tropes don’t already have covered, I’ll still take a crack at it.

I’m sure dutiful researchers could return some proto-mecha from mythology and literature, but the genre really gets its start back in 1956 with Tetsujin 28-go, a manga by Mitsuteru Yokoyama. Testsujin 28-go was turned into an anime in the early ’60s, and it got a stateside adaptation as Gigantor a few years later.

The titular mecha (Tetsujin Nijuhachi-go translates to “Iron Man #28”) is big and powerful and remote-controlled by a young boy, not piloted. Piloted mecha wouldn’t come around until Go Nagai and Weekly Shōnen Jump brought us Mazinger Z in the early ’70s.

And these are only two of the titles most instrumental in forming the basis for the Super Robot genre, one of two major sub-gradients of the mecha genre. Super robot shows tend to play fast and loose with the laws of physics. They lean heavily on Average Joe protagonists and mad scientists, and they favor the idealistic.

The other of the two sub-gradients is the Real Robot genre. Unfortunately, the robots are only real in the sense that they are slightly more realistic than their super robot cousins. It’s worth noting that there would be no real robot shows without the super robots of yesteryear.

Real robot gets its start just a few years after Mazinger Z, when Yoshiyuki Tomino created Mobile Suit Gundam in 1979. All real robot shows tend to lean toward harder science fiction. War and military organization are common aspects of the genre.

The Gundam franchise is probably the largest and most popular mecha franchise and a lot of the mecha genre as whole is defined in relation to Gundam. It’s a large and unwieldy beast that I am no where near ready to tackle here.

Meanwhile, I’m also only glancing over Neon Genesis Evangelion. Created by Hideaki Anno and Studio Gainax in 1995, Evangelion is a deconstruction of the genre. Angsty, complex and with ambiguously organic mecha, I’m not going to lie and tell you that I understand it based on the little I’ve seen and read.

In 2007, Gainax reconstructed the form with Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Gurren Lagann is an acid-tripping, physics-breaking, high octane return to the world of super robots. Its conflicts grow so large they’re essentially metaphysical, and the fanservice will definitely make anyone looking over your shoulder do a double take.

Meanwhile, I’m a big fan of 1999’s The Big O. Big O is an odd show in its own right. It’s film noir and post-apocalyptic. It begins like Batman with mecha and ends like something the Joker would construct out of newspaper clippings. I also enjoyed Samurai 7, an anime take on Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai that heavily features mecha.

If you’re interested in jumping into the world of mecha, you can catch Gurren Lagann on Netflix. Darling in the Franxx is another show available on Crunchyroll. It ended just this past weekend. Reception to its final episodes has been mixed. (I was mislead. Good lookin’ out, Sawcy.) It has two episodes left in its run. Initially getting a lot of positive buzz, recent episodes have gotten mixed feedback. I couldn’t get into it at first, but I may revisit it in the near future. Samurai 7 was one of the first things I watched when I began looking for anime in college, and it’s available on Hulu, Crunchyroll and Funimation.

This post took me a lot longer than I’d initially planned so I’m going to wrap it up. Until tomorrow.

ADDENDUM: I asked friend Nik for some insight into Gundam, and I ended up creating a brand new post with his feedback. Check it out.